I know most of you here are Marketo evangelists, but I have had nothing but issues with them since our signup about two months ago. My account manager is great, but there are SO many technical bugs and problems that no one seems to be able to provide an answer for - to the point that we have only been able to send one email in the past two months.

Is this common, and is there hope, or has it been consistently getting worse (for those users who have been here for a while)? I'm so frustrated because I was Marketo's biggest advocate internally, and I just feel like I hit a wall every time I try to show off a capability that *should* be working.

Please can you tell me your experiences with them, and do you have any recommendations on how to escalate things - I'm just at my wits end.

Hey Regina, every implementation of Marketo is unique, but what type of specific problems have you been running into? Did you migrate from another MA tool or are you starting fresh?

As far as escalating things, if you have support tickets open you should be able to escalate directly through the ticket -- but I would definitely look at the things that you're having issues with. Can you provide more insight there?

I have been having issues with the IP we're sending from being blacklisted due to another customers mailings - literally every time we try to send a mailing - meaning our spam filter/mail client (and the one we sell to the majority of our customers, who we're trying to communicate with) it is blocked, so they never get through. I would expect this to happen very occasionally, but this has happened every single time bar one that we have tried to send a mailing. It seems like a ploy to get us to pay for a dedicated IP, but we don't send enough volume to have one. I've managed to get on a "trusted ip" list, so we'll see if that solves that one problem, but that's just the beginning.

I couldn't access the support portal for the first three weeks of having the programme (even though I was the only registered account user, and the account admin), and I couldn't set myself as the support contact - that was all a massive mess, which was finally fixed.

I still can't access the University page - I have escalated this to T1 and still have yet to receive a solution for this.

I can't add other admins to the instance.

I consistently have trouble logging in, where it says my user name and password doesn't exist, can't reset my password, so have to email support for that.

The IP address was the big one, which is hopefully fixed now (after three weeks), but I was just wanting to see if my experience is a common one, i.e., is Marketo actually riddled with faults that no one finds out about until after you've bought the product, and the support is horrendous and we're all in this together, or am I just hugely unlucky? I'm not sure which answer would make me feel better

These definitely seem to be unique problems... One question regarding your sends: Have you set up SPF and DKIM (properly)? I know Sanford Whiteman knows a lot about this. This will help with your deliverability, if you haven't already set it up.

As far as everything else, I would really push back ******* your account manager. Even if they're great, they aren't helping to get these problems solved -- which is a huge part of their job.

Hopefully once these initial bugs are worked out you will feel like you can be successful with Marketo, as it is a very robust platform. And while there are definite improvements that Marketo could make, bugs aren't something that you should be running across. Best of luck!

I'll validate you Regina - the SPF and DKIM mean almost nothing when you're on the shared IPs. I had the exact same problem when we set up our instance and they also put us on trusted IP. It's virtually impossible to send an email to anyone who has any semblance of a spam filter when you're using the shared IPs because the server reputation is so terrible. What that indicates about the other companies using the shared IPs that brought the server reputation so low...I couldn't say, but I couldn't even send internal tests because my own company was rejecting emails from Marketo sent on it's behalf!!!!!

As for your other issues, sounds like your average implementation with some bumps in the road. My recommendation is to make friends with a support person, I did and he has been invaluable in tracking down what I need.

Yes, it's night and day. Our deliverability is fantastic and the only issues we have is from bad email addresses, which are quickly removed. Although we don't send much email right now (we're reevaluating our market strategy and re-doing personas with the plan to roll out specific nurtures), we do expect to ramp that up and so the 75K email limit per month on the trusted IP is a tough one. Especially when we have to cull or delay emails weeks.

They usually put firms who get blacklisted on the lower ranked shared IP. They will put you on a better IP if you prove you cleaned your list. I have a lot of recommendations on this site and my personal site.

Hi Josh Hill, they may move blacklisted people to different, lower ranked IPs, but when those people are blacklisted they're on the common IP addresses. Just because they're then moved doesn't mean that the IP address they were on doesn't suffer negative consequences.

Based on my talks with support when I implemented, this isn't uncommon - even though they move IP addresses around and try to rehabilitate them before making them available in the common pool, those IP addresses don't have a good reputation. Then you throw new Marketo users onto them and of course we'd see bad deliverability. In my case I wasn't able to send any emails! Not even to my own email address.

This wasn't my fault - my list is good, I have an opt in model and this was a warm list - I moved from another system to Marketo. This was 100% due to others misusing their Marketo instance and I suffered for it until I complained enough and Marketo put me on the trusted servers. It sounds like most people have to do this.

Hi Sanford, thanks for your unsolicited "help". I do have a DKIM record set up properly for the domain that we're using - I have plenty of experience with deliverability so I'm quite confident in my setup, my internal IT department has verified it for me (as we're an IT company, I trust them), and Marketo's internal tech team has verified it as well, so appreciate the offer, but I don't need you, someone I don't know from Adam, to look into it for me. This post wasn't for troubleshooting, and frankly, this is exactly the same response I got from Marketo for weeks until I finally got through to someone who would understand that the issue was their shared IPs, not my setup.

Apologise if this is a bit of a harsh response but I've reached my limit with condescension from people who refuse to acknowledge that the problem is Marketo, and instead try to place the blame on my setup.

In no way am I shifting blame from Marketo and the inherent problems with underpoliced shared IPs. Everything that others have said is accurate. Indeed, as I pointed out, SPF is irrelevant for most Marketo customers, yet they continue to officially require that mktomail.com be present in all customers' SPF records, which is a waste of time.

Nevertheless, if your domain is oryxalign.com, its SPF record does not include Marketo (and does not include Mandrill and some other providers that exist in a second, perhaps outdated, SPF-like TXT record that will never be parsed because it doesn't have the correct structure). This isn't condescension, merely clarity.

Just thought I'd step in here - specifically in support of the feedback you might receive from Sanford Whiteman. Sandy is probably one of the biggest assets - and most respected users - of this community. So I would definitely respect the information and insights he offers - which often goes well beyond what you might receive from Support (depending on who your support engineer is). Understandably, you probably haven't participated in the community all that much - and probably haven't collaborated with him in any in-depth discussions. Just know, when Sandy speaks, people listen! :-)

Hi Dan, I can appreciate that he may indeed know what he's talking about most of the time, but that doesn't change the fact that it was unsolicited advice - and completely off-topic (as well as misinformed!). I wasn't asking for troubleshooting or technical advice, and frankly, his insistence that I was wrong was irritating. I don't know him or his background, so may not have given his answers the level of respect that he may be used to on this forum, but he doesn't know my background either and just because I'm new to Marketo doesn't mean I'm an idiot. There's a massive difference between saying, "I know Marketo can get it wrong sometimes, so if you want an extra pair of eyes to check that everything is set up properly, send me your details and I'll have a look." and "I've already checked it, you're wrong." followed up a couple of hours later with another "You're wrong."

Yep, thanks Liz, I know it's meant to be accessible, and it is now, but for my first two months or so, I kept getting error messages every time I would try to access it, and when I contacted support about it, I was told it was related to the access issue I had with the University page, which took months for them to resolve, so it meant I couldn't join user groups and meetups, and I couldn't register for training courses, so when users on here tried to helpfully suggest that I join the user group, it was just more frustrating because it illustrated yet another issue that I was having.

I think we also need to be wary of noting "bugs" (there are some ;-) in Marketo when things like IP are not bugs - they are, in most cases, facts of life. If you are on a shared IP range (you are on more than one f you are) you will hit a spam trap pretty much at least once every day and more than likely due to other orgs mailings - if it your mailings then your data may have a spam trap in it or be poor quality. Do you know where your instance/is? UK or US?

The issue with deliverability is people expect 100% or compare it with previous rools...which, in marketing and with things like mass mailings to Outlook/Yahoo etc - is unlikely to happen.

We had the same deliverability issues. We got our a silver dedicated IP and then had to upgrade to a gold dedicated IP. We also set up dmarc authentication on the email subdomain that we specially created. It was grueling but took us nearly 5 months before we identified the problem. I'm assuming you've already done this, but you can check your sender score at returnpath.com for the IP address.

I had the same issue with the IP address. I think that this is something Marketo needs to pay closer attention to. We are very careful with our email lists, and to be blacklisted because someone else on the server isn't careful with theirs, isn't fair.

We pay a lot for Marketo, and I think there is an expectation that you shouldn't have to pay for an upgraded IP just to send emails.

Unfortunately, you gotta pay to play, my friend. I think it's been documented elsewhere (maybe even somewhere in the above dumpster fire), but there are some good practical/logistical reasons why Marketo doesn't just include them. That said, if your rep isn't crying in his 500 sqft apartment under the stairs after your renewal, you didn't negotiate hard enough

There is no reason why you should not be able to send emails. Some of our customer produce thousands of emails per year, each of them being sent to literally tens of thousands of contacts/leads.

There are some annoying hitches in Marketo, as I listed a while ago here: Just do it! Marketo so-called minor missing features , and there is surely room for improvement (give a look to the ideas section) but honestly nothing that prevents the work to be done.

Have you had enough training? Help from Marketo real consultant (someone with real experience)?

When migrating from other MAP, the logic of Marketo can be a little difficult to get. Especially the complete separation between assets (emails, forms, landing pages) and actions (smart campaigns), which makes it very different form most of the other solutions on the market, but also so much more flexible.

Faults as in problems that prevent me from using it as it is being marketed. The biggest problem preventing me from sending was detailed above has hopefully been fixed now, but only after countless hours of emails and phone calls.

No, I probably haven't had enough training, as I can't access the University portal to receive extra training, and they don't seem to be bothered by that... My consultant has been fab when it comes to best practices, but the technical issues (obviously not her remit) have been the things plaguing me.

It's not the actual practical use of Marketo I'm struggling with - it's actual technical errors that seem to be prolific across the platform.

I'm really sorry you have had such a difficult time getting up and running. There are some nuances with Marketo, but I've been using it for many years and sent out millions of emails by now and it does work. I know some things can be frustrating, but the community is a place to get help and you are not alone. Also you should check out your local Marketo User Group. That's how I learned most everything, by befriending folks there as well.

I experienced similar issues. My company has been with Marketo for a few months and all of our initial email sends had poor deliverability due to the IP address. We were able to get switched to a better IP address and that resolved the issue. Also experienced similar issues as you with the ability to setup support tickets. One day I could set up tickets and the next day I couldn't. The issue finally got resolved.

The support ticket issue was minor; not being able to deliver emails to customers was a huge issue. Thankfully both are now resolved. Hopefully Marketo is watching and considers making changes to their on-boarding of new customers since we have faced similar issues.

we've been with marketo for 5 years, but recent email performance is a disaster, indeed. It took marketo 2,5 hour to send a relatively easy-to-set batch blast for 250k that we've been sending monthly since 2013

What did the support said? - Oh, it's normal, we don't see any problems there

When our company first on boarded Marketo, we were experiencing the same deliverability issues with Marketo. The shared IP address was blacklisted by many of our customers. With a ton of back and forth, we were able to get a dedicated IP address which solved our issue completely.

Thanks Ayan, good to know I'm not alone in this, but disappointing that it seems to be such a common problem, and yet still takes so much work to a) convince them of the problem and b) have them suggest a solution.

You are absolutely right, Marketo has been growing at an exponential rate the last several years. I feel like with the overwhelming demand from customers, it is impairing their customer service. I hope this is a focus point for them for the next fiscal year.

I also get frustrated by functionality that I think should work better but (at the time) just does not. Most of us marketo admins share that pain from time to time. I've discovered that thoroughly searching the community for posts from others who have had that problem often leads me in the right direction to a solution (whether it be on my (admin) end or Marketo's (provider) end of things). Also, I've had success filing support tickets early on in my troubleshooting and getting good direction from support on technical issues for a faster issue resolution.

All that being said, I still haven't seen a product that blends a powerful feature set and an easy to use UI as well as Marketo has done. So at the end of the day, I'm still a fan (just a sometimes frustrated one).

I think this is fair. I generally subscribe to the mantra "it's a poor workman who blames his tools," but occasionally there are weird hiccups. I'm not quite willing to let Marketo off the hook for some of the things I've seen – from general slowness to timezones being represented wrong to RCA reports never being able to be pulled for... reasons – BUT there's no other platform out there that is a truly viable hub for all digital marketing strategies & tactics. So yeah... It's frustrating sometimes, but I still love it deeply.

Oh lawd... I just realized I'm practically married to Marketo...

In fairness, I think a lot of what we're seeing now is growth and server strain. I think that can only improve, but a healthy and honest dialog like this can only help speed it along!

Agreed - at the end of the day, it was still going to be Marketo against all of the other solutions, but it just would have been nice to be given realistic expectations when I joined, rather than being told it was basically the most perfect thing on earth. Because they weren't honest about the faults, I'm now in the uncomfortable position of having pushed very hard for Marketo and vouched for it to the board to get sign off, and now having to stand up and explain why, after three months, we've only sent three campaigns, and why we're out thousands of pounds for a sub-standard product.

As I've said above, it's good to hear it's not just me in this situation, but would be good for Marketo to take notice as this is obviously not an isolated issue, and it will only get worse the bigger they get if they don't start listening.

You've sent three campaigns three months after you...signed the contracted? Finished your implementation with a consultant? Or are you still in your Launchpack?

I've heard of implementations taking 2 years and having to completely restart (deleting their original marketo instance and starting from scratch). Depending on the complexity of your instance I'm not surprised that it's 3 months with so few campaigns. If a sales person sold it as up-and-running in a few weeks that's horrible and inaccurate.

I can only speak to my own experience, but Marketo is by far the easiest system I've used. A previous MA solution that I worked on wasn't able to do munchkin website tracking - they said they could, but the product didn't actually work - and it was almost impossible to calculate ROI (or even guess at it!). Marketo isn't exactly easy, but they deliver a good product especially compared to the rest of the market.

Yes. Implementation is roughly 90 days or less. If you meant that you didn't achieve the promised vision, then that's a project issue as Dory alludes to. I've definitely seen people blow up old instances. There are tons of reasons and not all are related to poor planning.

I have been experiencing the same deliverability issues and lack of help from Marketo to solve them. Like you, our SPF and DKIM is properly set up and we even moved to the preferred sender IP range, yet our customers still complain about not receiving our emails. We’re in the process of redesigning our website so my attention has been shifted away from our deliverability issues. However, as soon as the site is launched, I will be turning my attention back to deliverability. I will be sure to let you know what steps we take to solve our issues.

As far as my experience with Marketo, it’s definitely a love-hate relationship. When the tool works, it’s fantastic, but the deliverability issues and the lack of help from Marketo support has been beyond frustrating.

I hope you get your issues sorted out and please let me know if there is any additional information I can provide to help you.

Many delivery issues are self inflicted. If you have a clean list and are actively keeping it that way, then you can push Marketo to get you on a better IP range. Does everyone need a dedicated IP? no. But even with a dedicated IP, I get blacklisted all the time and it's because of my list, not Marketo. I was at a pretty small firm for my first implementation and we had a dedicated IP because we cared about our reputation. It's not that much money.

To OP Regina, outside of Delivery, yes, I've had bugs with Marketo and feel that their dedication to maintaining the code base is waning. I am usually able to get these fixed with help from Support and Engineering. Most of the issues, however, are the UI, not the backend. Most of my tickets are to find out what crazy things we did though.

Does that mean I hate Marketo or want to switch? No. I want them to get better and keep me happy. From what I hear in the world, the other systems all have similar problems in different ways...to paraphrase Anna Karenina, each MAP is dysfunctional in its own way. Marketo is the least dysfunctional, IMO.

The biggest reasons for cancelling on Marketo are

too much power for your level of marketing, so you never use 90% of the features (sales/RFP issue)

I agree that most deliverability issues are self-inflicted and admit that we contributed to some of our own problems. The lack of official support in diagnosing the issue is my chief compliant. We moved to the preferred sender ip range, yet issues still persist. As for a dedicated ip, our email volume is too low to qualify for one. Currently, we only use Marketo to communicate with our customers (with plans to expand to inbound marketing in Q1 17) so our list is clean.

Marketo is a great tool with an outstanding community, but my experience with getting official support on such a critical issue has been less than stellar.

Josh, the dedicated IP is not about the cost - we don't send enough to keep it "warm", so it would be wasted. Our list is clean, it's other people who are on the same IP as us that are causing the issue. I understand everyone will have some problems with their lists at some point, but as said above repeatedly, it's Marketo's refusal to acknowledge the problem that is the issue. Especially as prevalent as it seems to be based on this thread, you'd think they would at least know how to resolve the issue. Instead, I spent a month going back and forth with them arguing about my SPF/DKIM setup.

Hi Josh, appreciate the info. I am the highest person on my side - I'm the one who signed off the purchase, and I'm the one who has to be accountable for this product to my board, hence my anger.

I appreciate the offer for local experts, paid for help, etc., but I shouldn't have to resort to outside consultancy to just get a product running at it's basic function level. I understand there are more complicated aspects of Marketo that may benefit from a more experienced person behind the wheel when setting up, but to sell something that can't even send a bloody email - that's pretty poor.

If you don't sustain the volume for a dedicated IP, but your company has good marketing opt-in practices, etc., you can ask to move to a Trusted IP. These are IPs shared by customers who have exhibited good sending behavior and they tend to have better reputation and deliverability. There are a few minor requirements but it's free of cost. Just ask your support or implementation person and they can give you the form to complete.

If you have other issues with the system, we can help, as Jessica suggests. If you are having challenges with the Community, Liz Oseguera can help here.

You may also want to look at the many agencies out there for free help on their blogs or to consider having an expert guide the implementation. There are right ways, and wrong ways to do this. Marketo is a very free form workflow tool, so it can easily become complex if not designed well. They leave a lot up to you. Once you get the hang of it, you'll find it is very powerful.

FYI you tagged my non primary account (sorry that is even a possibility, you're impossible to tag!). Elizabeth Oseguera is my primary.

Regina Bluman Josh is right, I'd be happy to help with anything to make your experience better, whether that be in Community or I am happy to fid the right person to help you be successful with Marketo. Please let me know if you'd like to hop on a call.

Thanks for your response. I think it's gone a bit beyond the community help though, my original post was more of a vent to see if I was the only one who seemed to be having these issues. I've since had calls with the Director of Customer Experience or Success or something like that, for EMEA and all of our Senior Account Managers, and Senior Support and Head of Support and anyone and everyone else. My issues are *slowly* being addressed, but I have to say I'm still pretty shocked and disappointed that I've had to wait this long and escalate it to this point to start getting an acceptable response and to finally start getting issues resolved.

Our team will take a look into your cases, but I wanted to let you know that if you aren't happy or are concerned with how your support case is being handled there are a few channels in the Marketing Nation that give you the ability to escalate your case or to request a contact from one of our Support Managers.

To request a Contact from a Support Manager, this button from Support will open up the Support Manager Contact form.

If you need to escalate an existing case, from within the Case Detail in the CaseConnector there is an Escalate to Manager button that will appear for case escalation following support case response.

I tried for months to get my issues escalated (using the methods you suggested above), with zero improvement in response or resolution. I'm not whinging about something when there is an easy fix - when I posted this, I had exhausted all of the normal channels available to me, so while I appreciate you taking the time to respond, I'm afraid this is the exact type of response that drove me to posting in the first place - acting like I've missed something obvious, when in fact the failings are on behalf of Marketo.

As I have said above, my issues are finally being resolved through the most senior support person in EMEA (apparently) and the Director of Customer Experience (or some ridiculous title), but it's still pretty poor that it's taken me this long to get an acceptable response (and we're nowhere near a resolution yet), and it's even more poor that there seem to be a lot of other people here who share my experience, and perhaps aren't getting the attention that they need because they're not as... "vocal"... as I am.

Regina, I have had all of these issues as well and I have not gotten any real concrete help or support after months of trying to escalate. The one thing that I am grateful for is that the team at Marketo ignores my very senior male boss just as much as they ignore me. Initially I thought they might be ignoring me because I am a more junior employee and I'm female, but that is absolutely not the case. I can't even calculate how Marketo has impacted our traffic and the health of our email list. My condolences to you!

Also -- I was very intrigued to see the original post go out in a Marketing newsletter from Marketo. Is this the most positive customer feedback they've gotten lately?

We've had numerous issues; in fact we've recently had tickets open for 3 months where they've acknowledged defects in Marketo. Almost weekly we are submitting new cases--and considering their most recent outages--there seems to be some real issues going on. I've asked a few times for an explanation on why suddenly there seems to be so many problems and haven't gotten any real explanation.

And yes, we have a complex set-up with a number of custom objects syncing over from SFDC.

I am a new user and feel exactly as you do. I purchased additional hours from Marketo to extend my launch pack, which helped a little bit, but It got so bad one that I just sat down and cried!!!! I too was the strongest supporter of Marketo and swayed my company away from Pardot in favor of Marketo - my job and reputation were on the line.

I too hope this will get easier at some point. I have had to hire a 3rd party consultant to be available to me as my support. You may need to do the same.

we are running into Marketo/SFDC sync errors. Unfortunately, Marketo points me to our SFDC Admin, but she too needs better support from Marketo and is not getting it.

I know I did not help you in any way, but I wanted you to know that you are not alone.

Thanks for your response. I can completely empathise with you - I have had nights where I'm in the office past 9 pm, just trying to do the most simple thing in Marketo with tears in my eyes from frustration because I can't get it to work properly. Now the email editor has changed, and things aren't appearing in my inbox the same way they do in the editor, and on a whole, it has been radio silence from them since complaining about this.

While it is nice to know I'm not alone, it's horrible to hear that so many people are having this identical experience - and still, Marketo are doing nothing to remedy it!

It is a shame that you have had to extend your launch pack and hire outside help just to get the product working - it really shouldn't be that way, and I'm digging my heels in because I refuse to pay extra to just get it to do what it says on the tin.

Yes, I did look at Infusionsoft, but wasn't impressed with their features, and really, really couldn't stand the American surfer-bro voice everyone there had. They couldn't answer any of my questions, and just sounded high every time I spoke to one of them. I know that's a silly reason to dismiss a solution, but I couldn't bear it.

I have also experienced many bugs. Marketo does not have the font that is in our branding guidelines, the email templates are aligned improperly and the CTA buttons are having problems now too. The account manager I work with is often unresponsive and I have to send many reminders. Campaign Monitor was much easier to use and the analytics features were easier to explore and refer to as well.

If you're looking for a platform to simply send emails, then yes! By all means! Campaign Monitor is a better platform. But, if your company is in a position where they need a true marketing automation platform, then you really do need something more advanced -- and Marketo is a front-runner in the MA space. They will all have their strengths and weaknesses.

Also, as far as fonts, are you referring to landing pages or emails? For emails, Marketo only uses standard fonts that will render well across all email clients. This is not unique to Marketo. For landing pages, you can use ANY font, as long as you reference it.. There are a ton of questions on this: Using Fonts in Marketo Landing Pages

Hey Jenny, as Dory mentioned, the font thing is annoying, but not unique to Marketo - it just keeps your emails uniform across all of your recipients, as you can't control what fonts they'll have on their computer... I have had issues with the email template alignment and the CTA buttons not appearing properly, for example, long rectangle with rounded edges in the editor, square with sharp edges in my actual inbox...

Sorry your account manager is rubbish - just keep hounding, it's the only advice I can offer!